Softraid is cool, and so is Raid 0 with old Cheetahs...

Santilli

Santilli

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Jan 27, 2002
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Hi
Been screwing around with my G3 mac, and 9.21(9.22=conflict with softraid 221) for email. Since moving email to it, I have yet to have a virus, or worm.

For awhile, I was averaging one every other day on my pc.

I had setup off a first generation Cheetah.

I decided to open an old raid box, pull two of the second generation cheetahs, and use softraid to put them in raid 0.

It took about a 1/2 hour to get them to fit, since they are very thick.

After that, it took about 15 minutes to boot from cd, install softraid 221,
install 921, and boot from the dual raid.

Up and running for email, and it's MUCH faster then the single drive.

Using the oem ATTO UW card, GD cable, and terminator.

s
 
Had I to guess, I'd say 95% of what you're experiencing is the self-fulfilling expectation that your Mac is now faster.

Seriously, email isn't an application where an 80MB/sec transfer rate is helpful.
 
Tho with what sounds like half-height second gen 10K cheetahs?, STR wouldn't be at 40MB/sec to begin with.

Plus OS 9 is a fair slothy beast.
 
Yeah, well, if you put two cruddy, old drives in a RAID 0, you might get performance reminiscent of more recent drives.

And OS 9 is a bloated beast.
 
Yes, two Cheetahs in Raid 0 are faster then one Cheetah, first generation, and it gives me plenty of storage space, even though it's on single channel. It's a pain to wait for 9.21 to boot with a single drive, and
the dual setup is much quicker. Seems to elimenate a lag of about 30-45 seconds after the screen comes up where you can't do anything but move the cursor. No functions work. This happened with the single drive, but not with the Softraid setup.

Frankly, it's about the only fast drive solution I can come up with.
Sure, I could take a single 15.3K and hook it up, but, it's still only going 37 mb/sec, and running SE mode, on the OEM UW ATTO card.

The Jobs hand is in this one. You can't really add anything with compressed drivers without having the machine freeze, so if I want to keep the Voodoo 5500 in it, the OEM card UW and the Firewire card
take all three slots.

The ide channel is shite, giving all of 16 mb/sec, so any ide drive I hook up is sucktacular, and I tried the Tempo Trio card, which is how I found out about the compressed driver issue.

Given options, it puts to good use the two old Cheetahs, and when they die, I'll have one cheetah in the box, a bit faster then the backup UW 4.5 gig.
Overall, it was a nice upgrade.
Thanks to the peoples republic of Kaliforina, smogging my car is becoming much more difficult, and requires a new cat and oxygen sensor, about 600 dollars. So, finding something that works, and out of old parts laying around, fits the budget, and my geek side...
s
 
I did put an old LVD UL3D ATTO card in this machine, and while it would boot sometimes, it was much less reliable then the ATTO UW OEM card. I suspect the compressed driver problem.

s
 
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